


Embrace

by Jenni_Snake



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M, Wingfic, unspecified trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-04-01 01:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4001641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenni_Snake/pseuds/Jenni_Snake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if you could go back and help your younger self in pain? What would you tell them? What could you possibly do?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Embrace

_June, 1998_

There was nothing to distinguish the before from this moment, and no memory of the just-before, so he didn't try. Whether it was a dream, a memory, or - impossibly - a different point in time he was visiting - it didn’t matter. He was here.

The room - his room - was like it had always been, messy, not disorganized, just a lot going on. Homework stacked in piles along with extra research he’d done just out of curiosity. Some books that he was reading, others that were being used as houses and towers. A metropolis of toys covering nearly every inch of floor, being rampaged by dinosaurs of all sizes. And between it all, a path for the adults, who seemed to like those kind of things, meandering from the bed to the door.

He looked at the boy on the bed, curled up but not sleeping. Sniffling but not sick. Closed his eyes against it as the memory became the present. No point both of them reliving it. 

He sat on the edge of the bed, and the child-him flinched away from his touch... before recognizing its difference and letting it reach him.

Digits from the alarm clock - much too late for his eight year-old self - seared through the dark, casting the desk in a crimson glow.

Whether this was time travel or imagination, it was real enough.

"This is going to end, I promise," he said out loud, hand still on the boy's shoulder. "I know it doesn't mean anything to you now, because it just started -"

He found himself unable to go on.

"He'll stop hurting you forever in a few years."

Words were small comfort as the child's mind raced to grasp that eternal future void, the idea of ‘years’ when he'd hardly lived any at all. There was pain but no tears, just suffering in silence.

"And you know what else,," he continued, "you won't be afraid to… to play with the boys anymore - and guess what? Mom will even be happy for you. You're going to find," - he choked and finished in a whisper - "a really nice boy, and he's going to love you so much."

It was too much for his child-self to hear, that anything could be good, and he cried out loud, sobs that shook his frail frame.

Newt held him, but the mere embrace of his arms was not enough.

At that thought, there was a twinge in his back, and something of him, but that he never knew he possessed, a shroud of feathers cocooned around them, shielding them from every evil outside.

Newt, as his young self, stopped crying and slept, protected. 

Newt felt it, too. Felt calm and relieved and whole - and it was his turn to cry, but in joy, as he finally got the only thing he had ever wanted.


End file.
